PSU tier list 2.0

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Yeah, that's a hot mess with those changes. I don't like it at all. I really don't understand why they have to take something that works perfectly fine and turn into a bag of ass.

Seriously, the trouble this can potentially create is absolutely not worth the couple of pennies per year that MIGHT be saved by allowing the hard drive to power off occasionally when it's not needed.
 
Surely you would design it the other way around, so that no power on the pin meant no spinup... this is just asking for race conditions (main drive power comes up slightly before disable pin power, so drive boots and starts to spin then gets signal), and breaks compatibility.

Then there's pin 11 for staggered spinup - normally a ground; drive acts normally when grounded, waits to receive a command before spinning up if left floating.

its purpose is to allow users to manage the power consumption of SATA devices remotely and also provides the ability to hard-reset the drive from a distance in case you need to power cycle it.
Click to expand...
First part is already covered by many specs. The second arguably requires disconnecting all power from the drive - even 'compliant' drives are bound not to be fully powered down when that pin is connected.
 
Who really gives a damn about being able to spin up a Sata drive remotely? Oh, let me use my cell phone to call the pc at the store and boot the pc so it's nice and warm when I get there because that 20 seconds I have to wait on the boot sequence is killing me.
Want to aim this at businesses? Fine. Businesses of any size run server units. Wtf put this spec on a psu aimed at home use consumers and gamers who have no real need to access a pc when they aren't sitting at it.
To me, this is just sheer stupidity to use the same connection. Would have been better to make a new spec, call it Sata-C or some such, change the key on the connector and have companies sell drives intended for that purpose use either a universal Sata mount like the 3/4 pin fan header or a dedicated connection so psu's/drives don't get miswired
 
Yeah, I know. I don't like ANY of the Thermaltake units, no matter how good ANYBODY says they are. But based on what it is, it's probably better than a lot of what's available if you live in one of those regions where it's terribly hard to get your hands on anything decent. I agree with you though. Don't you ever sleep? I'm old, what's your excuse? LOL.
 
I can understand that. But unless it's a grandkid, I'm still inclined to think I've got you beat pretty handily in that department since my kids are all grown and moved away with kids of their own that they are likely beginning to experience that exact problem with by now. :)


Or unless your "kid" is in late 20's.
 
My youngest is still here, she was a gift we weren't expecting. The older 3 are all up and out although my son's back here on borrowed time as him and his fiancé took a serious nose dive. Well, more like their relationship ended like a toddlers wading pool after a belly flop by a sumo. We call him the Ghost since we work days, he works nights so we only see him for the 4 seconds it takes him to walk out the door on his way to work.
 


Can't really go wrong with any of those choices.
 


EVGA G3 is Leadex II with some tweaks to the filtering, both excellent. Seasonic Focus Plus is also excellent. Comes down to price IMO.
 
My tier 5 PSU that you guys told me would blow up in my face any day now over a year ago is still doing perfectly fine. It's about 4 years old now! Should I buy a lottery ticket? Ask out the next pretty girl I see? Or is it actually just incredibly uncommon for anyone to actually have an issue with the majority of brands you guys say are death sentences. It's like going on forums and reading how someones brand new VW blew up after 8000 miles, yet there are thousands and thousands of people who never have a problem with theirs but enjoy the great value and performance.
 


No to the first. Yes to the second. Maybe to the third.
 
Well, there are a LOT of people who didn't die because they had Takata airbags in their cars too. But there are some who did. I guess it's usually a matter of whether or not you are ok with being that one or five who pull the shortest straw. Usually when we give that kind of warning it's due to the hardware being used WITH the power supply, or else it's just a really, really bad power supply.

Just because you CAN drive around for years with a spare doughnut tire on your car doesn't mean it's a good idea or that it won't at some point blow out and put you in a ditch.
 
No, it's the law of averages. Quality psus have roughly a 1% failure rate. Granted with a million units that's still 10,000 psus that are bunk in one form or another. What's rated tier5 are units that have closer to a 20% failure rate. For that same million units that's 200,000 that go bunk. And going bunk, with little to no protective circuitry, that short goes directly to everything plugged into the psu. If you happen to be gaming, the gpu will take a massive hit.
Tier5 units are also often mislabeled, complete fabrications of power potential. They'll claim 700w, but only have a single 75w pcie for the 18A 12v rail, the rest of the 700w taken up by the 3.3v and 5v rails, which are next to useless since IDE disappeared.
https://youtu.be/f6snWfd1v7M
You seem to have gotten lucky so far, there's more than a few users of cheap psus that are under the impression that more power is better, so will use a 650-700w psu for a 200-300w system, so scrape by on pure luck. If they ever tried like the video to use much more than 50% of that cheap psu, the chances of failure skyrocket.

It's up to you of course to have faith in that cheap psu, but it's not something I'd ever recommend. Considering the minor difference in price between quality and cheap units vrs the price of a decent gpu, mobo, ram, drives, cpu, I'll pay the extra $40 or so. Seriously cheap insurance.
 


Anyone who has lived through many computers systems over the last 30 years can tell you about the failure rate of certain brands or out of brand components. You can roll yahtzee and have that chinese crap last you 5 years before it slowly starts kills off all your components(lack of protections), and you scratch your head until it finally dies. You can buy a quality component and be dead on arrival or within the first 24 hours etc!
 
What is considerable is the fact that out of the thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, who through even just the last few years have come here and received similar advice concerning a poor quality power supply, you are the ONLY one I've seen come back and say "well, I ignored your advice and now one year later my system is still working fine."

THE.ONLY.ONE

You'd think out of all the thousands of people, if there was fault in the advice there'd surely be more than one. Why is that? Because you are the only person out of thousands who ignored the advice? Doubtful.

Because out of the thousands you are the only one who thought of coming back to refute the advice? Even more doubtful, because anybody who HAD thought they knew better and ignored it would have felt the same as you do and would have wanted to come back and gloat about it.

You've gotten lucky, and that's ALL it is.
 
I've seen plenty of people saying 'but it's worked fine for years'.

The issue is risk: it's a low-ish chance of a high-impact event. Humans notoriously underestimate these.

If there's as much as a 1% chance of it blowing up or catching fire in the next year, it should be replaced ASAP. And yet, that means that 99/100 people that don't follow that advice will still say "everything's fine"
 
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